15 comments:

I wish this meeting was in my back yard as this is seems to be an extremely interesting and stimulating event. I see you will be talking about six double-slits and consciousness experiments. This is one series of experiments I am really curious about. Will there be a publication on this work around the time of the meeting?

looks very interesting, especially your sponsored presentation on Bell's Inequality. Good to see Dr Yount presenting again, although I prefered it when he was discussing his Qigong research (machine consciousness?). Looking forward to reading / viewing the presentations when they become available.

Glad to hear it has been submitted to a physics journal. Nothing is better than to expose the physics community directly to this. They have been shying away from the problem of observation for too long. I hope the last couple of decades development in quantum mind/consciousness theories have made editors more open minded, if only because of familiarity with the concepts. It should at least prevent them from just dismissing it out of hand.

I hope they get published, because that would add to the mainstream psi publications. Dean, why do you think public opinion about psi is moving on the positive side? I still see the same skeptics with the same lame arguments that are just gross misiterpretations... By the way, the Gaia's dreams, the unconscious psi, and presentiment parts of "entangled minds" have a lot of inportant data that many skeptics do not look at. I think those experiments are the most convincing (excluding ganzfeld because that is the most known one)

Massive surprise: the attempt by Wiseman, French and Richie to replicate Bem has failed.... and there is a big article in the Guardian by (Skeptic) Ben Goldacre. Be funny if it wasn't so predictable and damaging.

"Massive surprise: the attempt by Wiseman, French and Richie to replicate Bem has failed.... and there is a big article in the Guardian by (Skeptic) Ben Goldacre. Be funny if it wasn't so predictable and damaging"

I used to like Ben Goldacre and the Guardian, but now I realise the Goldacre is an incredibly smug and self righteous, plus when you have Wiseman and French they will deliberately design experiments to fail. The Guardian also is incredibly biased towards the materialist atheist view point so there is no chance of a fair review of experiments from Dr Sheldrake which was shot down in flames a couple of years ago although he wrote a rather decent rubbutle. It is a shame because unless Dawkins, French, Wiseman, Atkins et al all die suddenly and the Guardian and BBC go out of business (not that I want that because I like the BBC and a few Guardian writers or that I want people to die) there is no way that the British public will take the PSI/NDE etc research seriously.

on a completely different note, it's great to see more info from Julie Bieschel. Will there be audio files on the IONS website?

Richard Wiseman actually designed one experiment so it fails with the girl Natasha Damnika. He wanted her to get 5 out of the 7, she got four and they discredited her. 4 out of 7 is good, it is more than chance and you can see it if you do some calculations. A physicist who's name I cannot remember right now did it and found that if you got 4 out of 7 it was statistically significant. However, Hyman answered with his mantra "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof", and said she could have got sensory clues. First of all, we know the mantra is false. Second, If he believes that the experiment could give the girl sensory clues (It did not because it was carefully designed. HELLOOOO, designed by skeptics!)why didn't he try to design a more controlled experiment? One wonders if that organization really cares about research. The girl did not got any clues. She got four right and this shows us how CSI just try to find excuses to not accept psi phenomena. Excuses based on fictional things, because supposedly they are skeptics who design the best experiments with no sensory leakage. They are just self-contradicting...

Wiseman has zero credibility re objectivity on psi. Look at how he misrepresented the facts about Sheldrake's animal telepathy experiments (with the dog Jaytee). See what Sheldrake has to say there - namely how Wiseman misrepresented and quashed his own (that is Wiseman's) impressive data findings here, for years no less.

What on earth is Courtney Brown doing at this SSE meeting? He does not give RV credibility, only the opposite. How can John Alexander and D Graff stand to be in the same room as him? Sorry but this is a blunder on the SSE organisers' part. Courtney Brown is representative of the very worst of New-Age wooziness. Sheesh.

Dean, I'm sure you've already seen this but thought I would post it. It's the recent psi and psychology debate at Harvard. I found it very stimulating viewing. Sam Moulton appears to be going down the token skeptic route!

They call out Dr. Bem for supposedly using statistics to come up with the hypotheses after the fact, then call those effects confirmed.

Wagenmakers and company use statistics after the fact, setting the bar higher after already knowing the level of significance in the data, and say, "Presto, we just confirmed the null hypothesis."

That's just about as good as Moulton claiming that the brains of subjects using ESP look exactly the same as the brains of subjects exposed to normal stimuli, despite not having any ESP effect in his study to compare. Brilliant.